Lib at Large: Mill Valley filmmaker's paean to album cover art

DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER Eric Christensen has something like 10,000 vinyl record albums in his Mill Valley home. He started collecting them when he was a whiz kid rock radio program director in the '60s. In those days, it was all about the music. It wasn't until recently that he realized that he had inadvertently accumulated quite a collection of art as well — album cover art.

A retired entertainment producer for KGO-TV, his first documentary, 2007's "The Trips Festival," examined the early days of psychedelia. After its Mill Valley Film Festival premiere, the 64-year-old filmmaker started searching for another cool subject for a follow-up documentary, and ended up having to look no farther than his own record collection.

After three years of interviews with rock musicians, legendary photographers, graphic artists and others, his new documentary, "The Cover Story: Album Art," will have its world premiere Saturday at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.

"There have been coffee-table books on album cover art, but no one had done a documentary," Christensen says. "Record companies had all the best photographers and artists doing the artwork for their vinyl albums, and there are so many great stories behind those album covers."

Christensen found that rock stars like Leon Russell, Huey Lewis, the Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir were more than happy to talk to him about the loss of a once cutting edge art form rendered obsolete by the CD and the digital download.

"Famous musicians responded so positively to this because they're asked the same questions all the time about their music, but nobody asks them about their album covers," Christensen says. "It was refreshing to them, and a lot of them wanted to talk about it and lament that the album cover is no longer an integral part of what they're doing now."

With his history as a journalist covering pop culture, he was able to land an interview with Yoko Ono, who happily told the story of the nude photo of her and John Lennon on the cover of 1968's "Two Virgins" album. She giggled as she talked about the irony of Lennon shyly banning everyone from the photo shoot even though they all knew the cover would be seen by millions of people.

At the end of the interview, without prompting, she brought up the controversial "Season of Glass" album with the slain Beatles' bloody eyeglasses on the cover. Christensen had been too polite to broach the subject himself, but she said she had been there when her husband was shot, and she wanted people to see the ugly reality of his murder.

"It was very emotional," Christensen remembers. "The hair literally stood up on the back of my neck as she was telling the story."

As compelling as the Yoko interview is, he's most proud of the segment in the film about Blind Faith's eponymous 1969 album and its scandalous cover photo by Bob Seidemann of a topless 11-year-old girl holding a hood ornament from a 1956 Chevrolet.

"I've always been intrigued by the Blind Faith cover," he says. "Who was this girl and what's the story behind it?"

Using his experience as a TV news journalist, Christensen did some investigating and discovered that the girl in the infamous photo is Mariora Goschen, now a 54-year-old massage therapist at Esalen in Big Sur.

"You can find her on the Internet now because she's talked to other people in print, but never on film," he says. "I'm the only guy to get her on film."

Vinyl album covers have become one of the most collectible forms of music memorabilia. But they are more than that for Christensen, who remembers when a new album — with its songs, cover art and liner notes — was a cause for celebration, a creative force that brought young people together.

"When I worked in radio, I'd get promo copies a week before they were released to the public," he recalled. "People would come over to my house to hear new albums like 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' or 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' because I had them first. It was communal listening. We all sat and looked at the covers and listened to the music communally. Now it's people with earbuds listening alone rather than listening together and sharing the experience."